Dez Bryant Finally Makes a Second Half Impact

When Dez Bryant dropped a pair of potential touchdown catches in the first half on Sunday, it looked like we were going to get another round of discussion about whether the talented wideout will ever live up to his boundless potential.

After all, the second half wasn't going to offer anything but more fuel to the fire of Bryant's detractors. The third and fourth quarters have long been Bryant's kryptonite and the two drops didn't seem to signal that there was a big change ahead for number 88. All things are possible against the Rams, however, and Bryant's day was just starting to get interesting. 

He was targeted four times by Tony Romo in the second half and Bryant caught all four of those passes for 56 yards and a touchdown. That's a bounty for a player who had been targeted just 10 times all season after halftime and a really positive sign about the Cowboys' willingness to keep looking in Bryant's direction even after he makes a mistake.

That's not a signal they've been sending all that often this season. Every week seems to be about making excuses for Bryant and for the offense's refusal to get him more involved, but this week finally showed us that the team is going to be willing to go the extra mile to make sure they maximize Bryant's value to the team.

For the game, Bryant had five catches for 90 yards, one of the more productive games of his brief career. It couldn't have come at a better time. Indeed, the entire game couldn't have gone better nor could it have come at a more opportune moment. 

The Cowboys have spent the entire season having every single thing they do analyzed from every possible angle. It has been suffocating to watch so you can imagine how it must feel to be living every day under that kind of microscope. Sunday's win was against a bad team, but it was the kind of overwhelming performance against a bad team that forestalls any of the usual x-rays that follow Cowboys games.

It was just a day to feel good about what the Cowboys accomplished without a need to make more of anything than what unfolded on the field. The same goes for Bryant. It's a change that the team needed and one that might allow them to spend a week looking forward instead of backward for the first time all season.

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